In Saturday’s NP Platformed newsletter, Colby Cosh notes the death of Siegfried Fischbacher, better known as half of the stage magic team Siegfried & Roy:
… Las Vegas, as we all know, is a special place in which ordinary moral writ and aesthetic judgment have greatly diminished force. Vegas is honouring Siegfried & Roy this week, and will recognize them forever, as city fathers. Even Penn Jillette, a fellow magician whose career has been a crusade against old-school schmaltz and glitz and other Teutonic concepts that Siegfried & Roy embraced, inscribed a small tribute to his colleague.
Siegfried & Roy were true pioneers in transforming Vegas into a full-spectrum entertainment capital. Their basic function was not to parade oppressed animals, or to do conjuring tricks. Considered as “magicians,” did they have a signature effect? Or is the truth that prop-heavy, mechanistic stage magic is just relatively easy to combine with a wildlife act that also travels poorly?
No, their mission was to extract money from the family members of degenerate gamblers and, gosh, were they good at it. When they started out at the New Frontier hotel in 1981, Las Vegas was still its postwar self — an anarchic watering hole and sybaritic paradise mostly for adult men, associated with a boozy, jocular style of entertainment that was rapidly receding in the rear-view mirror of the culture. (Siegfried & Roy were never trendy, exactly, but being unique was enough.)
Almost no one can have consciously envisioned a world in which gambling in various forms regained wide, post-Protestant social acceptance. That gambling would one day become legal everywhere at an astonishing pace would have been seen as a nuclear-grade threat to the literal existence of the city. The nightmare has arrived, but Vegas is bigger and more economically sound than ever. Siegfried & Roy helped reshape the industrial nucleus of a city you don’t even have to like gambling — or showgirls — to enjoy.
